


we can work it out, can't survive unless you're next to me

by quirkdog



Series: can i tell you how i'm feeling? [4]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, M/M, brief mention of cancer & resulting death, discussions of anxiety/paranoia surrounding death, discussions of mental health, ik the tags are really dark but it'll have a happy ending i promise, mentions of disordered eating, tags will probably continue to be updated you know the drill
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:50:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26910166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quirkdog/pseuds/quirkdog
Summary: It's been over a year, and Troy isn't doing as well as he wants to admit.(this is going to be a longer followup to the events of the first work in the series, so if you haven't read that one then this will be sorely lacking context. please pay attention to the tags & stay safe!)
Relationships: Troy Barnes & Abed Nadir, Troy Barnes/Abed Nadir
Series: can i tell you how i'm feeling? [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1820587
Comments: 2
Kudos: 33





	we can work it out, can't survive unless you're next to me

**Author's Note:**

> hello all! long time no see. this one is gonna be more serious again, so strap in.
> 
> huge thank you to maya for her encouragement & also for proofreading this for me, as well as a general thank you to a very special group of people (you all know who you are).
> 
> heads up i'm not sure how regularly this will update because i am juggling a lot of work right now but i will work on it whenever i can! thanks y'all <3

Troy and Abed have been together for just over a year, and it’s probably been the best year of Troy’s life. He’s dating his best friend (which he thought would never happen), he’s just graduated from college (which he honestly also thought would never happen), he’s living with two of his favorite people in the world—by all accounts, everything is going pretty much perfectly for him.

So why does he feel like he’s drowning all the time?

(He knows exactly why, but he prefers not to think about it. Thinking about it would mean admitting that it happened, which is something he really doesn’t want to do.)

He’s thought about talking to someone—a therapist, Annie, maybe, hell, even Britta (not Abed, though, never Abed), but he doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it (he doesn’t want to admit that he’s struggling). Instead, he just goes about his life, ignoring the gnawing feeling in his stomach that’s somehow only grown worse over the past year.

(If he’s stopped eating as much lately, if he’s stopped sleeping lately, he tells himself that it was just stress over his last ever round of college finals. It’s not very convincing, though. He knows he’s lying to himself. He’s just glad no one else has asked about it, because he knows it wouldn’t sound any more convincing out loud.)

He puts on a brave face for everyone (for Abed) and pretends to be okay, because that’s what people do. That’s what men do. That’s what _Troy_ does (that’s not what he does, that’s never been what he does, but he supposes it’s what he does now). And he’s fine, really, he is (he’s not). Even if he isn’t, he will be (he’s not so sure). He’s just overreacting.

When Abed is out and he’s alone in their room, which used to be the Dreamatorium, he finally, _finally_ stops pretending he’s fine, he lies in bed and cries and cries (but always quietly, as quietly as he can, so Annie doesn’t hear) until his pillow is soaked with tears and snot is running down his face and he feels totally exhausted (it’s ironic, he thinks vaguely as he cries, that this room used to be the Dreamatorium, the room for pretending, but now it’s the only place where he isn’t pretending, where he allows the pretenses to drop and feel everything he’s been hiding from everyone else), and then he changes his pillowcase and washes his face so that no one will see, no one will know, no one will ask what’s wrong.

He’s been fine keeping this act up around everyone else, but he thinks (he knows) that if someone asked him about it he wouldn’t be able to pretend anymore, that the facade would break and he wouldn’t be able to put it back up ( _You’re afraid of vulnerability,_ the tiny Britta that lives in his brain tells him, and he tells her to quiet down).

Sometimes, when he’s lying in bed at night, Abed asleep next to him (Troy doesn’t, can’t sleep, not the way he used to, never all the way through the night, not anymore), he can’t keep it in, and he starts to cry again, tears silently tracking their way down his cheeks and onto his pillow. He thinks about it, about everything—he can’t stop himself, not there, lying in bed, nothing to distract him.

Abed had tried to kill himself.

(He had just stood there, and then he’d left.)

Abed had tried to _kill himself._

(He hadn’t even known.)

_Abed had tried to kill himself._

(He should have known, he should have said something, he should have done _something._ This is _his fault._ )

It feels perverse, somehow, crying like this in front of Abed, especially when it’s _about_ Abed, but he can’t stop himself. They haven’t talked about it, not really, not since the day after Abed came home from the hospital. No one else knows what happened (no one else was _there_ ), not really—except maybe Annie, but she only knows that he’d been cutting himself, she doesn’t know what he’d been intending (unless Abed has volunteered that information since then, but Troy seriously doubts that)—and Troy knows that it’s not his place to tell anyone, so this is all he _can_ do. He can’t talk to anyone about it (least of all Abed), so he takes these quiet moments to let himself _feel_ so that he can put himself back together again and pretend to be okay.

He’s also been keeping a much closer eye on Abed (that had been his mistake before, letting it build, letting things slide, and he can’t let that happen again). He keeps track of where Abed is, what Abed does, tries to spend as much time with him as possible (that part isn’t hard, they’ve always spent basically all their time together). If he notices that Abed spends a little longer than usual in the bathroom, if there are times where he knows Abed’s been alone in the apartment, Troy will comb through the trash, looking for bloodied tissues, bandages, bandage _wrappers,_ anything incriminating. Something that will tell him that his suspicions (his worst nightmares) are right, that this whole thing is still happening (he’s not totally sure what he would do if he _did_ find something, he knows he’s not great with confrontation).

The one line that he does draw for himself, the line that he refuses to cross, is reading Abed’s journal (he knows Abed keeps a journal, has seen him writing in the leatherbound notebook he keeps in the second drawer of his bedside table at night sometimes). He knows even in his paranoia that there would be no going back from that—he needs to keep some level of separation between them, give Abed some breathing room. Besides, if he read it and Abed found out, Abed would probably never trust him again (Troy wouldn’t blame him).

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Troy knows that everything he’s doing is a breach of privacy and trust on some level, but he’s able to rationalize it to himself—Abed’s safety is the most important thing, and if this is what it takes to keep him safe, Troy is willing to make that sacrifice (he can’t see Abed like that ever again, he refuses to let it happen).

Whenever they’re apart for any amount of time, Troy texts Abed obsessively to check up on him. If Abed doesn’t respond right away, he automatically assumes the worst, and his fear only intensifies until he gets a response, sometimes hours (and a series of increasingly worried texts from Troy) later. He knows that it’s probably really annoying for Abed to be getting near constant _where are u?_ and _are u okay?_ messages, but he can’t help himself—it’s like the moment Abed is out of his sight, out of his reach, he’s already dead. He’s aware that it’s become an obsession (if he’s being honest, it’s all he thinks about anymore), and that he’s started pulling away from his other friends (he wonders if they’ve noticed too, if they talk about him in hushed voices and worried tones when he’s not around).

If anything, as the months have passed, it’s only gotten worse. His specific fears of Abed hurting himself (of Abed _killing_ himself) have morphed into a general, all-encompassing paranoia—he’s afraid that Abed will get sick, that Abed will get injured, that Abed will somehow die in his sleep or drop dead in the middle of the day for no reason (he’s heard of SADS, and he knows that it’s extremely rare, but the fact that it does exist, that it could potentially affect anyone, _terrifies_ him). Suddenly, if Abed isn’t texting him back immediately, there’s a whole host of potential reasons, all of them terrifyingly bad, and his brain seems to spin a wheel to randomly choose one to obsess over until he’s convinced it’s true.

(Over winter break, Abed had taken a trip to visit Abra and her parents in Gaza for two weeks, and they’d been two of the most stressful weeks of Troy’s life. From the second Abed had left, he’d stayed glued to his phone, to the message app. As soon as Abed had texted him to tell him the plane was taking off and he had to turn off his phone, an anxious knot had formed in Troy’s stomach that had only grown until Abed had finally texted him to tell him he’d landed safely. Throughout that time, he’d tried to check up on Abed as much as possible without annoying him or making him suspicious, but the time difference had made it difficult. By the time those two weeks had passed, he’d felt like he was going insane—he had barely slept at all, and he’d only eaten when Annie made enough food for the both of them. He knows that she’d noticed that something was wrong with him—well, even more wrong than usual—but she hadn’t said anything. He’s still not sure if he’s disappointed or relieved about that.)

It’s not even just Abed, either. This paranoia seems to have spread to everyone in his life. It’s like a flip was switched in his brain the day he walked in on Abed, and he’s suddenly aware that everyone is in danger all the time, that anyone he knows could be hurt or killed at any time and that he’s powerless to stop it. His friends’ commute to school, his mother’s flight to visit her sister in Boston, every situation becomes a danger, every vehicle a death trap. From the moment Troy wakes up in the morning to the moment he falls asleep (and all of the moments when he wakes up in the middle of the night, and in most of his dreams too), he’s filled with more anxiety than he would have thought was possible a year ago. A part of him knows that, realistically, this level of anxiety is unsustainable in the long run, but he really doesn’t see it going away anytime soon.

Troy’s never been that religious (he used to pretend to be, for his parents’ sake, but he stopped pretending around the time they split up, and they never really seemed to care either way), but lately he’s found himself drawn to God almost obsessively. He prays every night in bed, folding his hands tight and and mouthing his way through the Lord’s Prayer, through his own prayers for Abed (for his health, for his happiness, for his safety), for everyone else (the list seems to grow longer every night, but he feels like he can’t leave anything out), crossing himself when he’s finished (he knows that his parents would cringe at him mixing traditions, mixing faiths, but he figures he might as well cover all his bases).

It’s not that he’s suddenly found some sort of faith or spirituality or something, though, it’s more complicated than that. It’s more that he feels like he needs to believe in _something,_ because believing in _nothing_ is suddenly terrifying to him. He _has_ to believe that there’s some being controlling the universe, someone or something that will listen to him and take his needs into account (he knows that when it comes down to it, it isn’t about God at all, it’s about him, that he needs to feel like he’s somehow in control of what happens, because right now he feels completely, totally powerless). So he prays, every night, no matter where he is, no matter how tired he is, no matter what’s going on. He’s been praying like this for about six months now.

(When he was young, probably about six or so, his aunt Jo had gotten really sick. Cancer. His parents had told him to pray for her every night, so he had. He had prayed every night, and she had started to get better. Still sick, but stronger. More herself. One night, though, he had forgotten to pray for her. He’d been too tired, and had fallen asleep. She’d died the next day, and he’d been convinced that he had killed her. To be honest, he still sort of believes that. He knows logically that it wasn’t, couldn’t be his fault, but that hasn’t stopped him from carrying the guilt around with him for all these years. Since then, praying hasn’t really been about talking to God or anything like that, but the fear of what will happen if he doesn’t. If he stops. If he forgets. He knows that’s not what it’s supposed to be about, that he’s doing it wrong, but he can’t stop himself.)

It would probably help his own anxieties to talk about it with someone (with Abed), but he knows he can’t do that. He can’t talk to Abed, because telling him about his fear and his paranoia would make Abed blame himself (it’s _not_ Abed’s fault, none of it is, and Troy knows that, but he knows that that’s what Abed would think). He can’t talk to anyone else, because then they would worry about him and _pity_ him and ask him _Do you think you should see someone?_ And they would mean well but it would make Troy’s skin crawl because this isn’t about him, it never was, this is about Abed, why are people worrying about Troy when they should be worrying about _Abed, stop making this about yourself like you always do, you’re being selfish._

It’s been over a year, and Troy’s come to accept that this is just what his life is like now, this is how it’s going to be. If there is a God, Troy assumes He’s punishing him for what he did, for walking out on Abed. He’s at peace with that.

He knows he deserves it.


End file.
